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posted by martyb on Thursday May 04 2017, @01:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the lets-party-like-its-1999 dept.

MP3 decoding was already free and got recently included in Fedora. But now, encoding is also free according to Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS: "On April 23, 2017, Technicolor's mp3 licensing program for certain mp3 related patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated." The Wikipedia MP3 article confirms that.

So, do you still use an MP3 library or have you switched to another format or means of listening to music such as (spying built-in) streaming services?


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  • (Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday May 04 2017, @01:16PM

    by pTamok (3042) on Thursday May 04 2017, @01:16PM (#504306)

    Well, kind-of.

    I wasn't explicitly thinking of PAR (which I knew about), but rather something more like a raptor code ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_code [wikipedia.org] ). I don't know if it is possible, but it would be good if you could preserve the characteristic of being able to recover a full copy of a file from any (sufficiently large) subset of the encoded blocks AND make the recovery probability 1 if you have more than a certain size subset. At the moment, recovery appears to be to be probabilistic, so by using a raptor code, you can only minimise the probability of unrecoverable error, not make it zero for a reasonable subset.

    What appeals to me about raptor codes is that the error-correcting redundancy is encoded into the totality of the blocks - there isn't a separate parity file (just like Reed-Solomon doesn't have a separate parity file). This makes the encoding robust in the face of a single loss of a set of adjacent blocks, or a loss of a random scattering of blocks throughout the file's structure, which I think is useful.